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Is Art a Form of Life?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

W. E. Cooper
W. E. Cooper
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

Basic to Richard Wollheim's theory of art in Art and Its Objects is the proposition that “art is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a form of life”. This sense of the expression “a form of life” (“ein Lebensform”) is elusive; Wittgenstein uses it only a few times in his Investigations, leaving such mysteries as how to interpret the famous gnomicism, “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life.” Wollheim's way of dispelling some of the mystery is to draw two fairly sharp implications from the thought that art is a form of life. It implies that artistic social institutions neither dominate artists in virtue of the stuffs and processes that they sanction and accredit, nor suffer them to work within languages or media which are arbitrary. I will be denying both implications.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1985 , pp. 443 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1985

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References

1 Wollheim, Richard, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Boston, MA: Blackwell, 1967), 226.Google Scholar

3 Hampshire, S., Freedom of the Individual (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). chap. I, “Two Kinds of Possibility”, 11–33.Google Scholar

4 Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

5 Taylor, C., Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I am indebted to philosophieal audiences at McGill University and the University of Alberta, and to Dialogue's anonymous referees, for acute and helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also wish to thank Stuart Hay, Jon Knowlton, and Al Reynolds.